poems, essays, prose

Put frankly, my thoughts of the horrendous sexual violence scenes in 13 Reasons Why are like a muddied cloth, with hands tearing at either end, pulling and ripping it apart. There is no clarity, and every time I try to put my thoughts together, the pieces seem to rearrange themselves in my mind. I’m almost envious of all the writers who have proclaimed their stances with their feet firmly planted, right or wrong, good or bad. But what if it is more than that?

This is your spoiler alert.

Watching Hannah Baker’s rape scene, I didn’t shed a tear of sympathy, like many people had. There wasn’t sympathy at all; there was an undeniable knowing of the experience and an inability to separate her body from mine. I watched as her hands began clenched, in a tight fist and felt my own white-knuckling, gripping whatever parts of my skin I could clasp, as if in self-protection. I saw Hannah’s inability to say the word “no” (as if fighting to scramble away and trying to leave said “yes”), and the walls of my throat closed shut. I wasn’t gasping tears like other viewers described, because my airways had simply clasped together, letting nothing at all seek through. Like an outward reflection of my insides writhing, I saw myself curl up tighter, into a ball, waiting for it to stop. I listened to his panting, thrusting, and pleasure all the while.

When the scene ended, anger surged through my body and rage filled my heart. I thought, how fucking sick and voyeuristic can we be, as a society. I didn’t fast forward, like I could have, and sat through it instead, and creators of the show kept us suspended in the long moments of violence, rather than… well, rather than the countless other ways you can depict the cruelty of sexual violence. It seemed, pun unintended, violently unnecessary. I wondered, what is the intention, here? Are these the steps people must take to gain ratings, viewers, and be the trend of the week? Is the exploitation of all-too-real suffering worth it?

I wondered why entire films can be dedicated to the experience of a person after losing a loved one, the painful process of grief and the trajectory of trauma in this process. A viewer can appreciate the pain and suffering a person experiences after this loss, and the countless ways in which it affects their lives, without needing to sit through the loved one’s dying. This is not the same when someone loses their body as their own.*

It is different with sexual violence. It is not enough to simply acknowledge it happened, and trust the person that it was traumatic, horrific and life changing, but we must see the victim suffer, sit through their experience and decide if it is painful enough. Is it not enough to see how Jessica suffered, drowning herself in alcohol to cope? How her whole life fell apart before her, and she no longer was a teenager who could sit comfortably with herself in a school day- she now had to be inebriated to make it through? Was it not enough, to learn how it impacted Hannah Baker’s desire to end the pain so badly, she chose to take her life?

If we take a moment to think of the purpose of showing these horrid scenes, I consider the following: What is the message? Who is it for? What is the purpose? If the message is for viewers to know it is painful and therefore be better equipped to support victims of sexual violence (or, god forbid, stop someone from committing sexual violence), I wonder why it takes the act of witnessing the suffering for this level of empathy to take place? What would it be like, to see how it changed their lives and simply trust that it was traumatic and true? What if we believed victims of sexual violence, for a while?

I’d say there are two sides to this debate, but truly, there are so many more. Victims of violence have come forward and said that this was the first time their experience of rape was accurately represented, without over sexualizing the act or showing it from the perpetrator’s perspective. I am not here to dismiss that. I simply just do not believe with confidence that re-creating sexual violence is the only way to get a message across.

Some of the show’s creators and contributors have said that it is important for it to not be hidden, as sexual violence is in the real world. My argument to that is this: you are not going to be there, witnessing the act, when a friend, sister, mother, brother, acquaintance or stranger gets sexually assaulted. You will be there for the aftermath. You will be there when they are living the pain of trauma and violence and their suffering and anguish and maybe doing a hundred things you won’t approve of. It is then that it matters if sexual violence is hidden. These are the times when it counts. You have the opportunity to bring the person out of the isolating, world shattering place of sexual violence trauma where things are hidden, and bring it into the light. Make it something a person can talk to you about. Be a person someone can talk to. You do not need to see it for it to be real. You do not need to see it to stop it from being hidden.

Believe them.

*The previous comment of “losing their body as their own” is not a blanket statement of how all victims/survivors feel. But it is for some. And in that moment, it is temporarily a large loss of agency, power, and control; however, I am not saying that the loss is permanent. We can have agency again.

Thirteen Reasons Why, and all of the things the other articles didn’t answer for me:

Each of us brings a backpack filled with biases, weighing on the way we see, feel, and interpret the world around us. As 13 Reasons Why has taken the world by storm, these biases are blazingly clear when scrolling through the countless articles commenting on the latest controversy. Suicide prevention advocates have called the show’s graphic depiction of suicide harmful, while others have suggested it could be life saving, by demonstrating the painful horror of suicide. The graphic depictions of rape and sexual violence have stirred up messages that comment on both the victims POV rather than the male gaze, and how triggering the all-too-real rape scenes were.

When I finished binge-watching the show myself (over a couple of long nights that turned into bleary eyed early mornings) I feverishly read through all the articles I could possibly find. This was both out of curious interest and a desire to formulate an opinion I had of the show, based on something other than my own knee-jerk reaction. I found plenty that resonated with me, undoubtedly; yet nothing that spoke to exactly what I was feeling. It took me a moment to realize it, but this was because so much of this show is so inherently personal to me, as it was to many others, and I simply wouldn’t be able to find something that spoke to my own experiences. We all have biases that shape the way we see the world.
Here are mine.

Part One: on the topic of Hannah Baker’s suicide

In Beyond the Reasons, the show provides a behind-the-scenes clip to the viewers, and they state that for every person that dies by suicide, an average of six people are directly affected. These are the survivors of suicide.

I suppose you could say I fit neatly in that category.

Shortly after I turned 20, I received a phone call on a payphone in Spain, where I was studying abroad, from my step-father. He told me in words I don’t recall that my father had died, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

It was just like it is in movies; my knees buckled, and I instantly felt my heart exploding with grief and tears. And guilt. More guilt than I possibly thought imaginable. I chocked out words that came out first, saying it was my fault. It was my fault my father died, in entirety, and the weight of the words coming out of my mouth felt heavy enough to push me six feet under. They weren’t a statement of self-depreciation or self-pity, the wound was far too fresh for that. The feeling of guilt for my father taking his life pulled the words from inside my body in the most guttural of ways; it was all I felt. I knew nothing else.

Two years prior, I ended a tumultuous and painful relationship with my father, that lasted 18 years and had broken my heart eighteen times over. I screamed at him over the phone that he had never raised me, and that the only thing he had ever raised was a drink. I screamed that I had never wanted money, I had wanted a parent. I screamed obscenities and anger and the kind of painful hatred only a daughter of an alcoholic can have. I loved him so much. But for the first time in my life, I knew that I needed to love myself more. I needed to let go.

I was my father’s only biological child. I never spoke to him once after that horrible, vicious phone call. I never replied when he sent me a birthday email the week later, or the one a year after that on my 19th. No email came on my 20th. No emails would come any more.

I believed that more than anything, my act of angry self-preservation by cutting him out of my life had ended his. The thought, “I left an old man to die alone” rang over and over again in my head like a mantra, and did for so long afterwards.

I know now this isn’t true. I know that my father had 52 years of suffering. He spent decades drowning himself in booze so that he didn’t have to feel whatever it was that made living sober unbearable. He most certainly lived with some sort of undiagnosed mental illness, and lived with an addiction more powerful than his love for anyone, including himself. He also, to my knowledge, had never been able to allow himself to seek help. I had begged him, time and time again, and I know that I was not alone in this. But I do not believe it ever happened.

What I know now is this: my father’s suffering killed my father. His lifelong pain, misery, alcoholism, accompanied by probable undiagnosed mental illness and deep trauma that I will never know for certain, took my father’s life. It poured the drink, lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.

Watching 13 Reasons Why, I couldn’t help but feel appalled at the totality with which those in Hannah’s life are blamed for her death. Characters speak lines to one another without a shred of doubt or contradiction in plain language, “We all killed Hannah Baker” and “I killed Hannah Baker for not being brave enough to love her”. There is no opposition to this; in 13 Reasons Why, this is the truth, undeniably. If other people did or did not do the things they did, Hannah would still be alive. This we know.
Or that is what the message tells us.

We have no idea what would have become of Hannah’s life if she did not die. We don’t know if one thing going differently would have extended her life by weeks, months, or years. Maybe it wouldn’t have at all, and would have felt insignificant in the face of all her other turmoil. But the thing is, we have no idea. People experience what Hannah Baker experienced and live. People experience things of “less severity” and die. The actions of the characters did not kill her.

What isn’t discussed at all in the show, are the internal factors that contribute to suicide. We have no idea if Hannah suffered from mental illness or what prevented her from communicating her thoughts to other people in her life who did love her unconditionally. We know none of this, because Hannah’s death was reduced to the actions of others and did not give so much as a nod toward the things that often lead a person to death: powerfully catastrophic chemical imbalances, untreated mental illness, and long-standing suffering.

It goes without saying that many of the things the 13 characters did are unforgivably horrific (looking at you, Bryce). No one is minimizing that. But what the show does, is minimize Hannah’s own suffering and possibly mental illness, separate from the mitigating factors.

Blaming others for someone else’s suicide is dangerous, harmful, and likely contributes immensely to those who are survivors of suicide losing their own lives in the wake of another’s death. It is irresponsible to show that as truth.

If you had asked me in the days, weeks, and months following my father’s death, what the thirteen reasons for his dying were, I would have told you:

Me.me.me.me.me.me.me.me.me.me.me.me.me.

But that. Is. Not. True.

I know that now. I do not carry the weight of his death as if it is my own weight to bear. The weight falls on his brutal alcoholism. Trauma. Mental illness. An inability to get help.

To suggest otherwise would be ludacris.

But it would also be untrue. It also is for Clay, and Jessica, and Alex, and Zach, and…